Getting through my first week at PNNL

During my first hour of work, I was told that PNNL (my lab) doesn't make good first impressions and that it just isn't very efficient at incorporating new employees. It didn't take long to understand this first hand.

First off, I had no idea where to go my first day. The form email I was sent simply told me to "go to (Insert Place) at 8:30." Since I didn't know where to go and the letter mentioned a badging office eventually, I started there. I got a badge and somebody found me a short while later. We had a short orientation followed by sitting and waiting for our mentors to come and pick us up. Then phone calls to our mentors asking them to pick us up. Then phone calls to anyone at all to come and pick us up. Finally Kristy, who also works in cybersecurity, came to fetch me. She showed me around to my building where I met Juana and Glenn. And these three people spent a considerable amount of time for the next two days getting me key card access to buildings, a phone, an email, and a computer. All of these things are separate systems. There is no "Do New Hire" button. But, aside from the computer, all of these things were relatively painless, if very slow to move. And a little annoying when you are standing outside a building asking people to let you in. But the computer was in a special class of its own.

My first computer was old. You could hear how old it was when you powered it up and the drives woke and stretched, creaking their bones and breathing heavily. The monitor was just as old and the picture shook a bit as though disoriented. I spent the first day sanitizing it, an eight hour process. The second day it only took 2 hours to learn that there was no image for the machine to ghost to because it was too old. That 2 hours involved several calls to IT for such answers as "Well, it shouldn't be doing that." But eventually we determined that I needed a new computer. We found one, but it had a DVI port for the monitor and the monitor was a VGA. So we hunted for a new monitor. Juana went hunting in one direction while Glenn and I hunted in another. We found a small LCD, which was an improvement over the old monitor, but still had a VGA plug. We took it anyway and went hunting for an adapter. The adapter we found took two VGA monitors. Which was handy when Juana showed up with a much larger LCD monitor that I could also have. So I spent the second day sanitizing another, but faster, machine. The third day, today, I got to set up my computer. Now I have a big desk, a nice chair, and dual LCD monitors (Low-res, but what more can an intern hope for? Don't answer that Scott. This isn't Microsoft.) all set up next to a big window. Not bad.